Barrow Burrow

Alaskan-born baritone-infused bedroom-elevator-pop of the highest order…possibly the only order. That’s what Jack brought into this world when he birthed Barrow Burrow.

In 2012, Barrow Burrow recorded a full length album at Swordpaw called I am another you. That was the first full length recording project at Swordpaw and we thought we were pretty cool even though I’m positive we did everything wrong except have great songs and have a good time recording them.

It’s not the quality, it’s the content; Jack wrote a compelling collection of songs for I am another you that no lack of recording expertise could ever detract from. In fact, one of my favorites, “Too late, too late,” used every manner of lo-fi, experimental, wrong, silly, stupid recording technique we could make up, and I still get chills when I listen to it.

Jack can write good songs is all I’m saying.

Recording "I Am Because We Are"

Sometime in 2014 Barrow Burrow returned to Swordpaw in spirit to record I Am Because We Are. Jack and I worked from different states to record this batch of songs in time for his wedding in June of 2015.

This EP was a gift from Jack to his wife Katie on their wedding day and it has an appropriate subtitle: an EP for katie, on our wedding day. So that was fun to be a part of.

The recording process went like this: Jack would send me demos of songs that he recorded to a click, usually just vocal and acoustic guitar. I would use the demo to set up a project in Reaper, map out the structure of the song and make any arrangement changes. Once we agreed on an arrangement, I would dive back into Reaper and use EZ Drummer 2 to create the drum tracks. The drum track would get sent back to Jack and he would record guitar on top of it.

At this point in a song’s life (drums and acoustic guitar), we would send the track back forth – Jack adding baritone and weird sounds; me adding bass and weird sounds. After a few rounds of back and forth we would have what sounded like a karaoke track to a song no one has ever heard. Then Jack (and occasionally Katie) would karaoke some vocals on top of it and we would have a finished song.

Some boring mixing and mastering happened, an exciting wedding happened and then the EP was released into the wild. You should check out the Bandcamp page for the story behind each song…it’s sweet…Jack’s a sweet guy.